Caring for the In-between Space of Politics: Myers’ Worldly Ethics

“[A]ny response that places man in the center of our current worries and suggests that he must be changed before any relief is to be found is profoundly unpolitical. For at the center of politics lies concern for the world, not for man,” writes Hannah Arendt (106).¹ Calls to turn to or adopt a particular ethos have abounded in Political Theory over the last century. Inspired by Max Weber’s Vocation Lectures, some argue that attention to ethical practices could supplant a more foundational and rule-bound moral theory. Others argue that late modern democracy demands an ethos to infuse and invigorate the democratic practices of citizenship. And still others find in these “habits of the heart” a commitment to community that would make political engagement civic-minded rather than rampantly individualist. In her recent Worldly Ethics, Ella Myers writes in the spirit of Arendt to assess what is gained and lost in the embrace of an ethos that attends to particularity while deepening the experience of politics. Concerned that the rough-and-tumble of politics gets lost in the shuffle, Myers seeks a more worldly ethical orientation, “one focused on inciting citizens’ collective care for world things,” and one that “emphasizes joint action by citizens” (11).

In sketching and giving shape to what passes for the so-called “ethical turn in political theory,” Myers hopes to rescue an ethos of care for the world from those who would retreat to an inner citadel or those unsure of how to participate. Against the lines of inquiry cited above, Myers mobilizes the language of ethics into something more insistently outward-looking and associative. Myers insists across the arc of this book, in an elegantly written argument that is simple and direct, that we ought to turn to those relationships and materialities that bind us to others, and cultivate them as relationships of care and reciprocity. Her book closes by proposing we adopt two resolutely shared and common ends: that of making the world into a home as much material as symbolic, and that of considering it to be, à la Arendt, an in-between space of mediated relationships.

In making her argument, Myers disputes two dominant currents in Political Theory. Chapter One argues that William Connolly’s (and others’) interpretations of Foucault leave us with a therapeutic ethics at risk of lapsing into individualism at best, or ethical consumerism at worst (15). With Chapter Two, she argues that the readings of Levinas offered by Judith Butler and Simon Critchley lose sight of both particularity and the hard work of hammering out political responses often orthogonal to the personal, ethical experience of being struck by those Other (16). If the first response breeds narcissism, the second drains politics of associational life — and both neglect the harms posed by material constraints. One of the most striking features of this book lies in its insistence on the political effects of material inequalities – a dimension of politics often dramatically absent from some strands of contemporary democratic theory.

In her reading of Foucault, Myers fears that his ethics might too easily collapse into an individualism that opens itself to cooptation by the ethics of consumer choice or self-help. Drawing narrowly on the History of Sexuality series and various interviews, Myers questions whether ethical practices can counter disciplining technologies – “what exactly distinguishes one from the other?” (33). Even when read with a more political eye, “Foucault’s writings seem to produce a bind” because either their “political relations are construed in terms of rule and mastery (as on the Greek conception) or, alternatively, because self-care is detached from the domain of political life altogether (as with the Romans)” (39). Neither model, it would seem, aligns self and political order on terms that speak to a modern governance that is more than rule and mastery, and that is premised on associative action. So Myers turns to William Connolly’s adaptation of Foucault to consider whether...